The Home Team

How the Chinese experienced the Olympics.

The Chinese take big events in stride; this was how they survived Mao, and weathered disasters like the Sichuan earthquake.Credit JOOST SWARTE

The night before the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics, Wei Ziqi joined two of his neighbors on the local barricade. It consisted of a rope stretched taut across the road, and the attendants had been given wooden paddles that read “Stop!” in both Chinese and English. Two of the neighbors wore blue-and-white polo shirts with the “Beijing 2008” logo across the chest. Sancha, their village, is a ninety-minute drive from the capital, and marks a point where the Great Wall winds through the mountains of northern China. At the barricade there was also a piece of paper with a message in English: “Please help us to protect the Great Wall. This section of the Great Wall is not open to the public.”

According to the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, or BOCOG, there were more than 1.7 million citizen volunteers in the region. The most visible ones were stationed at Olympic events and at places like the airport and downtown intersections, which were usually staffed by high-school and college students who spoke some English. These urban volunteers had been outfitted by Adidas, an official Olympic sponsor; the company provided gray trousers, new running shoes, and bright-blue shirts made of a high-tech material called ClimaLite. But the ClimaLite and the corporate sponsorship disappeared in the countryside. That was one way to gauge distance—north of the capital, the urban development thinned out, and along the way the volunteers’ gear became more ragged. The ClimaLite was replaced by cheap cotton; the running shoes were no longer standard issue; the Adidas logo was nowhere to be seen. Many peasants wore only a red armband, because they were saving the new shirt for something more important than the Olympics.

And yet the rural volunteers were diligent. Sancha’s population is less than two hundred, but the village had enlisted thirty residents to staff the barrier around the clock. Earlier that afternoon, when Wei Ziqi drove me through the countryside to the village, we were stopped at two other checkpoints. We also passed a crumbling Ming-dynasty tower manned by a lonely sentinel wearing a green armband that read “Great Wall Grounds-keeper.” In Bohai township, six miles from the village, I registered with the police. For the Olympic period, the authorities had banned foreigners from spending a night in this part of the countryside, but they made an exception because I had rented a house in Sancha since 2001. “Just don’t hike up to the Great Wall,” the cop warned me. He said that the big tourist sites were open, but everything else was off limits. On his desk was a stack of police manuals entitled “The Terrorist Prevention Handbook.” While we chatted, I opened one to a random chapter: “What to Do if There’s a Terrorist Attack in a Karaoke Parlor.”

For China, 2008 had been the most traumatic year since 1989, when the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred. In March, there had been riots in Tibet, followed by a brutal crackdown by the authorities. Overseas, human-rights demonstrators disrupted the Olympic-torch relay, leading to an angry nationalist backlash in China. In May, a powerful earthquake in Sichuan province killed more than sixty thousand people. Recently, there had been a fatal attack on Chinese military police in Xinjiang, a region in the far west where much of the native Muslim population resents China’s rule. All these events had contributed to the stress of the Olympic year, but I didn’t understand the concern about the Great Wall. “They’re worried about foreigners, people who might want Tibet independence,” Wei Ziqi told me. “They don’t want them to go up to the Great Wall with a sign or something.”

It was fear of a photo op—that somebody would unfurl a political banner and take a picture atop China’s most distinctive structure. The government also worried that a foreigner might hike in a remote area and get injured, creating bad press. For this, the authorities had mobilized more than five thousand people in the region, but labor is plentiful in rural China. And these volunteers were getting paid—another difference from the city, where patriotic students were willing to donate their time to the Motherland’s Olympic effort. Peasants were too practical for that; in addition to the free shirt, each rural volunteer received five hundred yuan a month, about seventy-three dollars. In Sancha, where the average resident earned about a thousand dollars per year, it was good money.

For Wei Ziqi, though, the Olympics didn’t represent a windfall. He and his wife ran one of the few businesses in the village, a small restaurant and guesthouse, and they missed the Chinese city dwellers who usually drove out on weekends. Since July 20th, the government had restricted the use of private cars, in an attempt to improve the capital’s notorious air pollution. The system was regulated through license-plate numbers: cars with plates ending in even digits could be used only on even-numbered days, and the odds were limited to odd days. This effectively ended overnight trips—if anybody drove to the village and stayed past midnight, he was stuck there for another day.

I never heard Wei Ziqi complain about the Olympics; nor did he show any animosity toward the hordes of “Free Tibet” protesters who were supposedly threatening the Great Wall. For a middle- or upper-class Beijing resident, the reaction would have been more emotional—such people were proud of hosting the Games, and many Chinese had been upset by the disruptions of the torch relay. But rural folks knew the limits of what they could control, and there was a distinct detachment from outside affairs, even those which affected the village. No adults in Sancha planned to attend any Olympic festivities. When I asked Wei Ziqi if he and his family would accompany me to some events, he said, “I don’t want to go.”

“Why not?”

“We’re not supposed to go into the city,” he said. “They don’t want a lot of people there right now.”

I assured him that spectators with tickets were welcome at the Games.

“It’s not necessary,” he said. “We can watch it on television.”

The night before the opening ceremonies, I joined him at the barricade with the other villagers. Wei Ziqi’s shift was 9 P.M. to 6 A.M. Only two cars passed through, both of them dropping off locals. Afterward, the vehicles turned around to hustle back to the city, because they had odd-numbered plates. It was like “Cinderella”—nobody lingered on the road after the clock struck midnight.

One barricade volunteer was a middle-aged man named Gao Yongfu. “President Bush just arrived,” he announced, fiddling with a small radio. “He’s in Beijing now. Putin is coming, too.” He continued, “An American company has the rights for Olympics television. They have the rights for the whole world! Even if China wants to broadcast the Games, it has to go through that American company.”

The third volunteer, a woman named Xue Jinlian, didn’t think that that sounded right. “They can’t control what China broadcasts,” she said.

“Yes, they can.”

“I don’t think so. Not in China’s own country!” Xue was silent for a while, and then said, “Chinese people are naturally smart. Their problem is they don’t have enough money. You look at America, and a lot of the top scientists are Chinese. There’s a lot of smart people here, but if there’s not enough money they leave.”

Village conversations had a way of veering off suddenly, like a hawk that catches some invisible air current, but inevitably they returned to settle on certain topics: food, weather, money. Gao brought us back to the weather—the air was heavy, but he said that the government wouldn’t let it rain the following night. “They can make it rain somewhere else instead,” he said. “I don’t know how it works, but it uses high technology.”

The villagers were still discussing the weather a little before midnight, when I walked back to my house and went to bed. Later, I heard that the first car of August 8th had come through the barricade at around 2 A.M. The license ended with the number two—a Beijing motorist determined to make the most of his twenty-four hours. That same day, the government would fire more than a thousand silver-iodide-laced rockets into the sky, insuring perfect dryness for the opening ceremonies. At 5 A.M., jet lag woke me up, and I wandered back down the road. Behind the barricade, Wei Ziqi dozed in the passenger seat of his car, and morning light shone on the Jundu Mountains, and nothing about the peaceful scene suggested that this day was different from any other.

Earlier that week, I had arrived on United Flight No. 889, San Francisco to Beijing. The airline was a sponsor of the U.S. Olympic team, and the gate in San Francisco had a pre-race feel: the solidarity of the starting line, that moment before the pack breaks into its inevitable divisions. The U.S. women’s softball team was there, as were the synchronized swimmers. The American track cyclists had gathered near the windows that overlooked the tarmac. Two athletes from Belize wore matching tracksuits. There was a National Olympic Committee member from Venezuela, an elderly man who wore a brown bow tie and carried a cane. The television people were easy to pick out—tall blond women with BlackBerrys and burnished skin. Jim Gray, a prominent sports announcer who was covering the Olympics for NBC, strode up and down the terminal, avoiding eye contact with anybody who recognized him.

Once boarding began, the solidarity dissolved, as if this race had started fast. The TV folks vanished into first class and business class, along with the Venezuelan committee member. The pair from Belize sat quietly in economy. Most of the American athletes were in economy plus. The softball team sat along the left wing, and the cyclists and the synchronized swimmers took the right; if it wasn’t perfect ballast, it was close. “Everybody here at United would like to welcome all the athletes,” the pilot announced on the intercom, after takeoff. Later, he spoke again. “I want to pass on a message from the women’s softball team,” he said. “They want to say, ‘Good luck to the men in tights!’ ”

There was no rejoinder from the cyclists. They wore white compression tights beneath their T-shirts and warmups, and periodically each athlete stood up and took a lap through the aisles, shaking out his legs. That was the United 889 velodrome: walk to the bathroom, turn at the exit row, duck past the softball mockery, and head back toward Belize. On one of these circuits, I interrupted Michael Friedman, who was scheduled to compete in men’s track cycling in two weeks. He was a friendly twenty-five-year-old with reddish hair and a barrel chest. “It’s for the blood clots,” he explained, when I asked about the compression tights and the pacing. “We’re not supposed to sit down for too long.”

The flight took more than twelve hours, and at Beijing airport’s Terminal 3 we were greeted by smiling volunteers wearing ClimaLite. There were also representatives from United Airlines, who distributed information sheets to all American athletes. Among other matters, they warned the Olympians about the volunteers:

We ask that you stay with the group and our staff as we’ve experienced instances where BOCOG volunteers (in blue uniform) with the intention to assist has directed part of our groups off on their own.

Other bullet-point instructions had a slightly ominous tone:

· Please note that Immigration officers normally will not provide an explanation when they take your passport and OIAC card away.

The athletes had fallen silent, and they gathered in a tight cluster, like cattle on the open range before a storm. Four cyclists wore black face masks, which covered the nose and mouth, and had the sharp lines of armored visors. Michael Friedman said that the masks had been issued by the team, in case the pollution in Beijing was bad. “They told us we should do this,” he said. He looked a little sheepish; none of the athletes from other sports wore masks. But then they hadn’t used the compression tights, either. “I figure, no reason to take any risks,” Friedman told me with a shrug.

The cyclists wore their masks through baggage claim and customs. At the exit, television cameras were waiting, and the images created a brief uproar after they appeared. Within a day, the athletes had issued an apology, through the United States Olympic Committee. It read, in part, “Our decision was not intended to insult BOCOG or countless others who have put forth a tremendous amount of effort to improve the air quality in Beijing.” The day that I sat on the village barricade, the apology made the front-page headlines of the China Daily:

TORCH TIME IN TOWN AS

FEVER RISES

PUTIN PRAISES PREPARATIONS

US CYCLISTS SORRY FOR

WEARING MASKS.

The men’s road-cycling final was the day after the opening ceremonies, and it was one of the few events that didn’t require a ticket. The race began downtown, winding through the city before heading north to the Great Wall. Down the street from the Lama Temple, white metal barricades had been erected along the sidewalks. The ClimaLite crew was there, stationed at intervals of thirty feet, and there were also local volunteers in “Capital Public Order Worker” T-shirts. Plainclothes cops worked the crowd. In China, undercover officials have a distinct look: well-built men in their thirties or forties, dressed in button-down shirts, dark trousers, and cheap leather loafers. They almost always have crewcuts. At the cycling race, they had been issued little Chinese flags in a halfhearted attempt at cover, but they didn’t wave them like everybody else. They held the flags beside their hips, like weapons at the ready.

On the sidewalk, two men played the game of Chinese chess known as xiangqi. They sat on stools around a wooden board, and they paid no attention to the growing mob of people. If they noticed the plainclothes men, they gave no sign—Beijing residents had learned long ago to take surveillance in stride. And this was the chess players’ turf: in the shade of a scholar tree, in front of the Badaling Leather Shoe Shop. Zhang Yonglin, one of the players, owned the shop. His opponent was a retired auto mechanic named Zhang Youzhi. The players were unrelated, and locals referred to them as Little Zhang and Old Zhang. Forty minutes before the start of the cycling race, a volunteer told them to leave.

“Wait until we finish this game,” Old Zhang said.

He carried a fan inscribed with gold calligraphy, and he gestured with it, a brief swipe that indicated that the game wouldn’t last long. The volunteer was lower caste—no ClimaLite—and she shrugged and left the men alone. A few minutes later, an official BOCOG volunteer walked over. “You need to move,” he said. “There’s going to be a bicycle race here.”

“We know that,” Old Zhang said. “We’re just going to finish the game.”

This time, the flip of the fan was more dismissive. The young volunteer seemed reluctant to challenge this elderly man, and so the game continued. By now, seven people had gathered to watch, and one of them told me that Old Zhang was the best player in the neighborhood. In China, chess is a sport: the Chinese Xiangqi Association is administered by the All-China Sports Federation, just like the Chinese Cycling Association and the Chinese Basketball Association. The federation also handles bridge, Go, darts, and the Chinese Tug-of-War Association. If this seems a muddled view of athletics, then it helps to think of the All-China Sports Federation as being concerned with competitive pastimes, broadly speaking. Beneath this umbrella organization, some associations exist with the primary goal of competing against foreigners at the Olympics. This is why the Chinese excel at obscure sports, and why so many of their 2008 gold medals were gained in events that average citizens almost never encounter: archery (one gold), sailing (one), shooting (five), weight lifting (eight). They won a gold in canoeing, a form of water transport as Chinese as the tomahawk. It’s a triumph of bureaucracy, and it shouldn’t surprise anybody. If a nation can organize 1.7 million volunteers, from Tiananmen Square to the Great Wall, all of them outfitted according to subtle distinctions of class and status, then surely it should be possible to find and train one woman capable of winning the RS:X windsurfing gold. (Her name is Yin Jian.)

But, like the concept of bureaucracy, chess had a presence in China long before medal counts. And Chinese chess truly feels like a sport, as does chess-watching. It even has set positions. There’s always at least one observer who gives advice before a move is made. Another onlooker waits until the move is finished before he offers his comments. This is the pairs event for spectators—the coach and the critic—and you would expect it to drive players to violence. But all aggression is directed at the board. Near the Lama Temple, Old Zhang and Little Zhang slammed the wooden pieces as hard as they could with every move.

Thwack!

“I’m giving your horse something to eat!”

Thwack!

“I need a gate! I need a gate!”

“Right, right! That’s the right move!”

Thwack!

“I’m giving it to you cheap!”

With twenty-four minutes left until the cycling, and after the players had been asked to leave on three separate occasions, Little Zhang finally conceded the match. He did this Beijing style: he dumped the pieces on the ground and howled, “Old Zhang plays black!” Then they immediately began another game. By now, they had an audience of fifteen people, including four security volunteers in uniform. Periodically, a plainclothes man wandered over, flag at the hip, to watch for a few minutes.

As Old Zhang played, he used his fan like a master. He folded it when thinking; after a move, he always unfurled it with a flourish. Near the end of the game, when it became clear that he had left himself vulnerable, the fan began to move jerkily, as if in irritation; but still the old man said nothing. At last, he conceded with a smile. There were fewer than ten minutes left when the men finally put away the board.

Now the crowd pressed toward the barricades, and for a long time the road was empty. “They’re coming!” somebody finally said.

“Cars are coming!”

“They’re all Volkswagens,” somebody else observed. The advance vehicles were black VW sedans with tinted windows. Then came a police motorcycle and police car, followed by a truck with a big platform that swivelled like a gun.

“That’s the television camera!”

Two lead cyclists whizzed past, a Chilean and a Bolivian. Half a minute later, the entire pack went by so fast that the crowd could hardly react. Nobody had any idea who was in front; the uniforms weren’t printed in Chinese; the cyclists’ faces were a blur. For an instant, there was stunned silence, and then everybody saw the long line of support cars and cheered.

“Why do they have the bikes on top?”

“That’s for fixing them.”

“Each one has a flag—look!”

“Those aren’t Volkswagens, though.”

“They’re Skodas, I think.”

“Skodas, definitely.”

“There’s an ambulance!”

They gave the last-place ambulance a good sendoff. For a few minutes, the street was empty, and then it was as if another race had begun. The leader was a battered bicycle cart carrying scraps of wood. A normal bike followed, then a Honda cab. A truck full of bottled water. A parade of odd-numbered plates: 1, 7, 5, 9. The crowd dispersed; volunteers dismantled barricades; Old Zhang shuffled off to lunch. “It was O.K.,” he said, referring to the bicycle race. Earlier, he had shown me his fan’s calligraphy, which consisted of a poem entitled “Do Not Get Angry.”

“It reminds me to stay calm when playing chess,” he said. The opening verses read:

Life is just like a play, and we are here only because of destiny

It’s not easy to be together until we’re old, so why not cherish it?

When I told Wei Jia that I had an extra ticket to the fencing competition, he asked me which kind. Wei Jia was Wei Ziqi’s eleven-year-old son, a native of rural Sancha. “There’s peijian, zhongjian, and huajian,” he said matter-of-factly—sabre, épée, and foil. “The swords have different sizes and shapes.”

Like all elementary-school children in the greater Beijing region, Wei Jia had been issued a textbook called “The Primary School Olympic Reader.” It began in Olympia (“The grass is green and the flowers fragrant”), descended to cartoons of naked Greeks wrestling, and continued to Baron de Coubertin. One section featured the Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi; another was devoted to John Akhwari, a Tanzanian marathoner who, in 1968, showed great sportsmanship in finishing last. The chapter about Liu Xiang, China’s great hurdler, made you wish that the book had been issued with some wood to knock:

Liu Xiang is healthy, and while training and racing he rarely gets injured, which is hard for an athlete.

It was partly Wei Jia’s interest that persuaded his father to accept my offer to attend some events. The first one was rowing, and Wei Ziqi called the night before with a question about raincoats. “Do they give them out free?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Why would they do that?”

“I was watching on TV,” he said. “Everybody in the stands has the same color raincoat.”

Somehow, despite hours of watching the coverage, I had missed that detail. I said that the coats were probably being sold at venues, but Wei Ziqi was shrewder. “You’re not allowed to use umbrellas, right?”

This was true, because of security concerns.

“Well, if they don’t let people use umbrellas,” he said, “then maybe they give out raincoats.”

I didn’t quite understand the logic, but the following day, after we passed through security at the Shunyi Olympic Rowing-Canoeing Park, about twenty miles outside Beijing, the first thing we saw was a woman handing out cheap plastic ponchos. It was like that at every event—the organizers knew their crowd. The Chinese love freebies, and there were always volunteers distributing something: plastic flags, cheap cardboard binoculars, fans with the McDonald’s logo. They gave out pamphlets that described the rules of various sports and told the audience how to behave. (At volleyball: “Applauding is welcome at appropriate times during the match. Booing and jeering is not allowed.”) Concessions were unbelievably low. Instant noodles, which Chinese like to eat dry, were thirty cents. A can of cold beer cost less than seventy-five cents. It was possible to show up at fencing at 10 A.M., spend four and a half bucks, and get a six-pack of Budweiser. But no Chinese person would ever do that. Few Chinese have spent much time at spectator sports, and there’s no tradition of drinking at the ballpark. Most people buying beer seemed to be foreigners.

The Chinese were focussed, and they were intense. There was none of the looseness of the street; these people had paid for their tickets, and they knew that the opportunity wouldn’t come again. They were often silent at the beginning of an event, almost on edge as they tried to figure out the action; it got loud later, especially after Chinese athletes appeared. At the preliminaries of men’s sabre, during the first hour, a fistfight broke out three rows ahead of where Wei Jia and I were sitting. It was like a play within a play: in the background, Renzo Agresta, of Brazil, was slashing at Luigi Tarantino, of Italy, and then two Chinese men stood up and started whaling at each other. They appeared to be middle class; one was accompanied by his child. In China, public disagreements are common, and typically they consist of a lot of shouting that goes nowhere. But at fencing there was no prelude and no encore, just ten seconds of flailing. By the time the ClimaLite showed up, nobody was talking, and the volunteer couldn’t figure out what had happened. The men simply sat down and shut up, terrified of getting kicked out. The most I learned from neighbors was that the dispute had started over sight lines.

The woman next to me was named Wang Meng, and she was a graduate student in agriculture. She had received her ticket from a friend, who bought it online more than a year earlier. At face value, it cost four dollars and forty cents; when I asked Wang if she would have resold it for three hundred dollars, she shook her head. “This is my only chance to see something at the Olympics,” she said. She spent the first half hour talking in hushed tones with her neighbors, trying to determine what it meant when a fencer’s helmet lit up.

In the past, I had disliked attending athletic events in China, because the nationalism is usually so narrow-minded. Few people care about the sport itself; victory is all that matters, and there’s little joy in the experience. But at the Olympics I sensed something different. Cao Chunmei, Wei Jia’s mother, talked mostly about how the events made her feel. “It’s peaceful,” she said at synchronized diving, whereas wrestling made her nervous. She said that the Bird’s Nest—Beijing National Stadium—was luan, “chaotic.” “That’s the way it should be,” she said. “A real nest is like that.” Her favorite was the National Aquatic Center, the Water Cube. When I commented that the patterned exterior resembled bubbles, she disagreed: “Those are too big to be bubbles.” She liked the place because it gave her a clean feeling.

The brand-new rowing park, in Shunyi, also initially made her nervous, because she couldn’t swim and disliked boats. Shunyi is the kind of small city that’s common in the suburbs of sprawling Chinese municipalities, where many residents are peasants on their way to becoming something else. The local officials were proud to host rowing, canoeing, and kayaking. They had hung banners all around town that said “Culture is in Shunyi / The Olympics are in Shunyi.”

There was a brief rainburst and the family sat happily in their free ponchos.Rural people travel light—none of the Weis had brought anything with them, not even Wei Jia, who planned to stay with me in the city to see more of the Games. After the event, we said goodbye to his parents and got in a cab. I asked the driver to recommend a restaurant. “The Golden Million is good,” he said.

The Golden Million’s mirrored entrance was decorated with four hundred and ninety-three bottles of Old Matisse Scotch. At the center of the restaurant was an enormous tank filled with a dozen sharks, two soft-shelled turtles, and one woman dressed as a mermaid. In addition to a long mono-fin, she wore a bikini top, a face mask, and a nose clip. A sign said “THE CAPITAL’S TOP MERMAID SHOW!” The tank was circular, and the woman swam laps with the sharks and the turtles. One advantage of travelling with Wei Jia was that he often came up with the questions that I was too stunned to ask.

“Why is that lady in the water?” he said, looking concerned, when the waitress came to our table.

Later, Wei Ziqi told me that at the rowing complex, after I got in the taxi with Wei Jia, the next cabbie had refused to take him and his wife. There was a long line of cars, but the drivers had been instructed to take foreigners only: Chinese spectators had to wait for the bus. Wei Ziqi laughed when he told the story; he didn’t take it personally.

In February of 2001, when Beijing was bidding to host the Games, I had accompanied the I.O.C. inspection commission on its last tour of the capital. For more than three hours, our motorcade travelled through the city, visiting potential stadium sites; everywhere we went, the traffic lights turned green, as if by magic. Along our route, the façades of hundreds of buildings had been freshly painted in bright colors. According to government statistics, workers had brushed up twenty-six million square metres, which meant that they had painted an area nearly half as big as Manhattan.

At that time, even dissidents spoke out in favor of the bid, hoping that the Olympics would bring political change. That possibility was reportedly a factor in the I.O.C.’s decision; many members believed that the 1988 Games, in Seoul, had helped to reform South Korea. “What the hell is the Party going to do?” an American who had served as an I.O.C. adviser told me, back in 2001. “It’s going to be really hard to have a Stalinist Party and open the Olympic Games.” Liu Jingmin, Beijing’s vice-mayor, told me that the organizers had considered but finally rejected the slogan “Great Wall, Great Olympics.” Seven years later, it was clear that the Communist Party could indeed open the Games, and the decision regarding the slogan seemed wise, given that there were now some five thousand peasants guarding the structure against foreigners.

Ever since Deng Xiaoping, China had become steadily more receptive to the outside world, but there was still a distinct element of fear and insecurity. The Olympics undoubtedly helped to promote openness, but the Games didn’t initiate a political transformation, just as they didn’t change the basic outlook of most people. Long ago, the Chinese had learned to take big events in stride; this was how they survived Mao, and how they weathered disasters like the Sichuan earthquake. And such fortitude was evident throughout the Games, although you had to know where to look. You could see it in the calmness of the divers and the toughness of the weight lifters; it was obvious in the discipline of the gymnasts. Most Chinese athletes come from poor rural areas where children are recruited into sports schools. Sancha was already too prosperous for that—no village kids in recent memory had attended a sports school, and Wei Ziqi told me that he wouldn’t want his son to take such a route. But other places had fewer options, and parents were satisfied to have their children enter the well-structured bureaucracy of the sports system.

The peasants had also left their mark on the facilities, at least indirectly. When I reread the promotional materials that BOCOG had given me at the time of the bid, they seemed almost modest in comparison with what was eventually built. In 2001, the government promised six subway lines spanning a hundred and forty kilometres; they ended up with eight lines of two hundred kilometres. The sketches of proposed arenas looked blocky and bland and utilitarian. There was no Bird’s Nest, no Water Cube, nothing of distinction. But since then the economy had boomed, driven by the continued migration of people from the countryside, who also provided the labor for the elaborate construction—it was more than just paint this time. In a sense, China had reached the perfect stage for hosting the Games: workers were cheap, political accountability was minimal, and the rising middle and upper classes could attend and take pride in the competition. They were the ones who responded most deeply to the Olympics—crowd energy came largely from the young and the affluent. In the stands, it was easy to forget that most Chinese are still country people.

I liked to wander the distant corners of the arenas. Often the worst seats had been given away: at men’s sabre, in the most remote section, a hundred and fifty Beijing Forestry Bureau workers sat with thunder sticks in hand, looking slightly dazed. At the preliminaries for Greco-Roman wrestling, there was a group of schoolchildren from Changping, a city outside Beijing. Their teacher stood up to make an announcement: the father of a competitor was sitting right behind them!

The man was in the last row. His name was Chang Aimei, and he was fifty-two, but he looked at least a decade older. He had dark skin and sun-wrinkled eyes, and he carried a farmworker’s white sweat towel. In his lap he clutched all of the day’s freebies: a Chinese flag, a flag with the Olympic mascot, an English guide to the Games. He also had a Chinese pamphlet with instructions on how to behave at Greco-Roman wrestling: “Spectators are encouraged to greatly applaud wrestlers who have demonstrated superior skills, or who have scored high points.”

Chang Aimei’s son was named Chang Yongxiang, and moments earlier he had defeated the reigning world champion, a Bulgarian. Chang Aimei was calling his wife; like many people from the countryside, he shouted every time he handled a cell phone. “Eldest Son just competed!” he yelled. “He won! What? I said he won!”

For the next hour, the phone rang repeatedly: relatives, friends, reporters from back home. The Changs came from Hanba, a village of fewer than three thousand people in Hebei province. They farmed wheat and corn on three-quarters of an acre of land, and their annual income was less than six hundred dollars. In the nineteen-eighties, one of Chang Aimei’s nephews had been selected for a wrestling program, eventually becoming Chinese national champion. After that, Chang Aimei believed that there were opportunities for his boy, who was naturally big. At the age of thirteen, the son left home to enter the county sports school, and then moved to the provincial level and the national team. He now wrestled in the seventy-four-kilogram weight division. I asked Chang Aimei why he sat in the last row.

“The coaches don’t want him to know I’m here,” he said. “They don’t want anything to disrupt him, so they told me to sit in the back.”

It was only the second time he had seen his son wrestle. Three days earlier, local officials had told him that they had some tickets, and that he could have one. The others went to the village Party secretary and the director of the county sports bureau, both of whom had moved down to better seats. Chang Aimei’s daughter waited outside the arena; she hadn’t been able to get a ticket.

Two years ago, his son had competed at a meet in Colorado Springs. “He said you Americans are really nice,” Chang Aimei told me. “He said it’s very clean there, too.”

It was early in the day, and the athletes were working their way through the rounds. At the Olympics, Chinese men had never done better than bronze in wrestling; nobody had ever made the finals. In Chang Yongxiang’s second match of the morning, he defeated a Peruvian to qualify for the semis. When it came time for his next competition, I made my way to the far corner of the arena. His father was still there, sitting alone.

Chang Yongxiang was matched against a Belarusan named Aleh Mikhalovich. The crowd had grown louder all morning, and now they chanted, “China, go! China, go!” The Belarusan threw Chang out of the ring almost immediately, scoring four points, and won the first period. But then Chang seemed to gather himself. He was stocky, with thick thighs and a square jaw. He had bristly black hair and after every clinch he shook his head like a bull. He evened the match with the second period. Now the spectators were on their feet; the school group from Changping screamed and banged their thunder sticks.

Behind them, Chang Aimei remained seated. His legs were crossed, as if he were relaxing after a day’s labor, and his belongings were neatly stacked on his lap: towel, flags, pamphlets. He had not moved a muscle since the match began. His eyes were fixed on the distant mat, and he said nothing. But I could hear him breathing—steady, steady, steady. In the third period, the Belarusan took the initial point. Deeper now, deeper now. The match continued with Chang Yongxiang in the lower position; he escaped and scored a point. Inhale—almost a gasp. Another point, and then it was over, and the referee was raising Chang Yongxiang’s arm.

Eventually, Chang lost to a Georgian, taking the silver medal. But on the day of the semifinal he left the ring triumphant, already the most successful Chinese Greco-Roman wrestler in history. At the top of the arena, safely out of sight, Chang Aimei still looked relaxed. He was silent until he took out the cell phone. “Wei!” he shouted. “He just won again!” ♦

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